14.02.2017

With the Noose Around My Neck 30

And that is what the book is about, that time between the death of Hirohito and the beginning of the new millennium. It’s a book of portents, of symbols. Like we had an eclipse here in the UK five days ago. Twigs, crows, wisps of clouds and the occasional rooftop ... Then we’re into the cloudscapes, a homage both to Stieglitz’s Equivalents and the paintings of Emil Nolde, and from there we segue into the manmade world. Vents, fans, underwater pipes. Then there’s that photo of a squashed frog. Life in the air, life in the sea, life on earth, the northern lights, and forked lighting mix with more clouds and foliage growing over an abandoned building and hay wrapped in harvest cladding. The skyscapes are matched with swirls of erupting mud, a close-up of the pocked moon matched with one of the sun, sunspot blotches clear to see. So yes,

Kruk’s work, then, is from this perspective a kind of front line reportage: surveying and exploding the superstructural cracks in heteronomously imposed categorial consciousness, attesting to and amplifying the bleed and double exposure, as in “today I require ID from all wingless insects” neatly splits the surveilled population into Alatae and Apterae, tacitly sponsoring the latter’s entry, perhaps through a window via stratiform drift, perhaps indeed with a view to lexical misappropriation in for example the forging of new intransitive verbs: “I crocodile” ... “I anxiety” ... “I am Agent Buzz” ... slithering out of the cave on all fours for the second time ... It feels like a soft return to the muddy shores of Fukushima, something of a slow train coming while I, Agent Zubb, am being tied to the tracks by an introduction to R.G. Collingwood’s philosophical re-unification of those “forms of experience” rendered disparate by the Renaissance. So no, the history of textile production is for Olsen not a labour history per se (as for Pinsky), but the history of a literally authoritative practice. As a young man, I thought I could go blind jerking off to the sun ... now I observe that the opposite is true. The room gets smoky at times since lamas burn offerings such as oil, butter, grains, honey, sugar, spices ... And each ingredient pops with a slightly different sound, scent, and color of flame. Which is to say that the Burakumin were the descendants of an outcast caste (let’s say, the Japanese “untouchables” ...) and not a racial or national minority. Well into the 70s, their lives were still separated from the general public. I loved playing with kids there. We shoplifted many things, like candy, porn and comic magazines, toys, all kinds of stuff from all kinds of stores, then collected them in our hideout. I never got the roster of siblings right, but they were mostly sisters dropped off at peewee colleges that each had a pond and a climbing wall with trampolines underneath. They were all majoring in medical billing. Then, one day, I wandered into one of those warehouse shopping clubs. I wasn’t a member, but a man in a smock waved me through. I walked and walked until I came to an aisle where my eye was caught by a box with the taunt “24 COUNT.” It was all I could do to stop myself from breaking the thing open and counting them out one by one, whatever they fuckingly foolishly were — pouched chippings from something cracklier, fracking into the Halliburton loophole, if you will. But this unearthing effort was to be sporadically disrupted by pop-up pastoral poems. I imagined these pop-up pastorals, or counterpastorals, as animated .gifs, cobbled together as euphonious but possibly specious and surely infuriating choruses of the buried facts, specters and chemical afterlives unearthed by the archaeologists (weeping heavy metals, solvents, oils, PCBs, plasticizers, etc.), written against a copper and bacterial backdrop or cloth or hologram or site. To breach, to fluoresce: the colors yellow and silver, red and black. Another color, a color we cannot see, a color there’s no word for: folded many times. The pressure before the word arrives. The wet paper. How the fold decays and becomes a part of this other landscape.

An egg hatches inside another. A god/ess of multiple heads.

I cried about the film and felt vindicated.

Today’s memes are transcendental perhaps,

divine inexistence eternity through the stars escape from the entropocene

No one fux w/ Iron Pyrite.

No wonder I wonder if things would be different if I made 1,000 iterations of the same piece over the course of 3 or 4 years. I want to be wrong in the most grandiose way conceivable. Maybe I’ll make 1,000 iterations of the same piece. No musicians put out the exact same album 10 times in a row. Or do they? Buy it if you like it. I don’t know how it works. I equate you with the Kardashians and I don’t know why. I want to turn on fluorescent lights. I am not an angry person, I just literally think this kind of complainey tone is beautiful to read. Is it archival? IDK. Glass carrier rope tie. Large centered eye shape in top third. I left a stack of three tamale husks on top of the cut-out-center Stephen King paperback my roommate hides weed in. The marks left behind by brown box tape.

Mud is lovelier than snow Munich is unique for us 1 is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do 2 can be as bad as one (is the loneliest number since the number one) 3 is perfect for crime (but there’s always one who won’t make it on time) Love and you will be traded Freeze (and your death will be slow) You were the ultimate factory

Now the doctors told me I’m fit back to work I rented a tree house it came with a fork I spend all my evenings reading Mayakovsky

Later, when the sun went through the night, I dreamt of being made of glass or other intellectual capacities. So now, part of my mind is made of wood from which a person can make a good table. From the beginning it was also used to create new music of some sort. But the best way to get some rest is history. I don’t understand why some people just can’t find it funny. The only feed is the pure feed. By this Guide, then the highest intellects ought most certainly to be liberated; but should they not be liberated, then while in the Intermediate State of the Moments of Death, which is also the pure feed, they should practice the Transference, which giveth automatic liberation by one’s merely remembering it. Devotees of ordinary wit ought most certainly to be freed thereby; but should they not be freed, then, while in the Intermediate State [during the experiencing] of Reality, they should persevere in the listening to this Great Doctrine of Liberation by Hearing. Accordingly, the devotee should at first examine the symptoms of death as they gradually appear [in their dying body], following Self-Liberation [by Observing the] Characteristics [of the] Symptoms of Death. Then, when all the symptoms of death are complete [they should] apply the Transference, which conferreth liberation by merely remembering [the process]. If the Transference hath been effectually employed, there is no need to read this Thödol; but if the Transference hath not been effectually employed, then this Thödol is to be read, correctly and distinctly, near the dead body. If there be no corpse, then the bed or the seat to which the deceased had been accustomed should be occupied [by the reader], who ought to expound the power of the Truth. Then, summoning the spirit [of the deceased], imagine it to be present there listening, and read. During this time no relative or fond mate should be allowed to weep or to wail, as such is not good [for the deceased]; so restrain them. If the body be present, just when the expiration hath ceased, either a lāma [who hath been as a guru to the deceased], or a sisterbrother in the Faith whom the deceased trusted, or a friend for whom the deceased had great affection, putting the lips close to the ear [of the body] without actually touching it, should read this Great Thödol. Now for the explaining of the Thödol itself: If thou canst gather together a grand offering, offer it in worship of the pure feed. If such cannot be done, then arrange whatever can be gathered together as objects on which thou canst concentrate thy thoughts and mentally create as illimitable an offering as possible and worship. Then the ‘Path of Good Wishes Invoking the Aid of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas’ should be recited seven times or thrice. After that, the ‘Path of Good Wishes Giving Protection from Fear in the Bardo’, and the ‘Path of Good Wishes for Safe Delivery from the Dangerous Pitfalls of the Bardo’, together with the ‘Root Words of the Bardo’, are to be read distinctly and with the proper intonation. Then this Great Thödol is to be read either seven times or thrice, according to the occasion. [First cometh] the setting-face-to-face [to the symptoms of death] as they occur during the moments of death; [second] the application of the great vivid reminder, the setting-face-to-face to Reality while in the Intermediate State; and third, crap, I forget. But no matter. We are always in the pure feed. “Eyeballs!” You should hear Soul, Pace and Ever laugh. Whch means it’s all-out war among the big dinos, during which HinPee 1234567 HinCee 7654321 2 637 1170 crystalline forms spread, melting into an amoeboid mass in which the thin blue petals were still burning from the three flickering jets. You looked off-camera. It was astonishing how much space there was. We had had some other devices besides space: shadows along the fumes of a ... a ... what? As we climbed from terrace to terrace, the gardens changed. Some were in the form of mirrored labyrinths, others in the form of complex telepathic emblems, CisPee geetac the muscular coat and descend between it and the mucous membrane in a longitudinal direction, parallel with each other as far as the morphologies, in what appears to be a continuation of the enriched PeeVull mimesis of fractionation, and a set of disposable microfluidics cards. But I could not keep my eyes closed, for you peeled back one eyelid to reveal a fleshy glass protrusion in the shape of an oyster or an antique clock. It dug in, working away for a few minutes before it was able to bring out the zither, which I played like a motherfucker. “The control of a machine [or organism since these modes of organization were by analogy interchangeable terms] on the basis of its actual performance [feedback] ...” Did I tell you it was a live zither? (24-5). To you I am “dismembered,” sometimes “crooked,” and replaced by an “Owl,” with quartz crystals instead of guts. Speaking of which, I had accepted the chair of anatomy in Padua in 1537, and presented my findings in De humani corporis fabrica. A craggy landscape appeared; enormous pits next to a blasted, flaking area cut by two huge crevasses. “It’s like skin at twenty thousand times life size” you said. “One of my favorites.” That’s when Ezra’s face transformed: Meher Baba. The message, destroyed in a house fire ten years later, alleged that a neural program or ‘algorithm’ could be implanted in subjects, though the modalities of this invasive operation remain to this day utterly mysterious. A stimulus of some kind was to trigger an internal generation which would get externalized by humming. I mean like hmm hmm hmm, hm hm mm hmm, hmm mm mm, hm mm. “Smoke on the Water”, baby. Though the experimenters were apparently of mixed feelings concerning the long-term effect of this implantation, the intention was that these generations would proliferate as precursors of corporately-valenced melodies-to-come. Then, as Hans Vollman put is, A beam from the ceiling came down, hitting me just here, as I sat at my desk. And so our plan must be deferred, while I recovered. Per the advice of my physician, I took to my — A sort of sick-box was judged — was judged to be — Efficacious (to quote Roger Bevins III).

Efficacious, yes. Thank you friend.

Always a pleasure.

There are also textual fragments (historical documents, memoirs, diaries) contextualizing Lincoln’s situation in February 1862, describing the circumstances of his son’s death, and discussing the status of the Civil War. Some of these fragments are quotations from real sources, some are not, eee gee Cannery anyhelpmate? Come. To. Heap me? Cannery help? Can any wonder? Help. Conneg ayone heap? Unclog? May? Place hepMay, to quote L. B. Papers. So yes, Annapurna Devi’s Raga Kaushiki does remind me a lot of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” And the mountains of Holland.

Everything that matters is and will continue to be even if perhaps the clouds go dry and all that endures is grass, a ton of grass, hidden under the rug.

Pamphlets fall from the sky. Equidistant from Los Alamos and Roswell, workers place polished steel poles in the desert landscape, constructing a grid. The poles are angled at eighty-eight degrees. The primary experience takes place within the grid. The imaginary plane rests flat upon the tips of the grid-poles. One narrative theory is that Agents’ minds function as the imaginary plane. That this is not separate from Agents’ social bearings, but rather central to Agents’ realization as social beings, is one effect. Pamphlets fall from the sky, onto the imaginary plane. One narrative theory is that the sentry posts face inward rather than outward. The rabbits’ infrared vision burns through the string that is used for the coin-slot coin trick. Tom died while we were gone. What if, in the non-oppositional mode, he drew upon the senses to begin to make this form, and made play of the laws? “From the hill the road sloped down and to the right. A dark grey bird with an orange beak skimmed across, paused on a wooden fence, shat, then continued its curve as the blob fell. All the way on the tube he kept thinking of the line ‘And we walk through the valley of fables where the eagles lie.’ It was going to rain.”

Have you left something out: “Negative, says my Gunslinger, no thing is omitted”

each little square is its own vertiginous place

it goes on for ever —

April 22 1663, Leeches in Vinegar. Bluish Mold on Leather; April 29th, A Mine of Diamonds in Flint. Spider with Six Eyes; May 6th, Female and Male Gnats; May 20th, Head of Ant. Fly like a Gnat. Point of a Needle; May 27th, Pores in Petrified Wood. Male Gnat; June 10th, Sage-Leaves appearing not to have cavities; July 8th, Edge of a Razor. Five Taffeta Ribbons. Millepede; July 16th, Fine Lawn. Gilt Edge of Venice Paper; August 5th, Honeycomb Sea-weed. Teeth of a Snail.

He likes vegetable soup with lots of pepper and Jamaican hot sauce, nonchalant antinomian futzpah. “This is species-being!” cried I. “C’est libération!” And did it make me feel good? Of course it did! ... but that’s what ‘i wrote a poem about a fucking river’ pushes you towards, right? I mean, can we edit out zeitgeist for weltanschauung? Right.

Right. asterisk BAM! asterisk BAM! asterisk

(“Moviemento”) (“Motion”) (“If you are the

amber mare …”) (after Octavio Paz) (For

Alan Baker and Ernesto Priego) (OK)

If you are the hummingbird flying backwards I am the foucaultian porn site and the vampire ideologies on daytime tv If you are the far-away detonations and the dismemberments I am the money that was still softening while symbols were still averaging out

If your cellphone has no reception the floor fell out of the studio along with the dancers but the dance didn’t die If you are the forest on the sky the veins of your hands startle and the vortex, or is it the chaos (the blurb’s kinda sketchy), searches for the geometric center of our modern-day mal de vivre

and if that, then (intensified color of the light principle) and if that, then both of us are very small, drawn on bits of paper, yellow flowers on a black background, something we could never explain and if that, after more silence, feeling that I need to add more, I say, “It has been many days since I spoke my name” you look at me encouragingly, as if now I will recite the whole thing with all the traditional bows and squeaks, and if that,

Rotating Superfly Periodista is correct. But the empirical evidence gathered without correct Dialection of the Social is like a mop without a handle, hard on the knees.

If Heidegger poses himself as a kind of unscrambling device for a massively entangled historical narrative whose other end somehow involves a telephone call James Moody was right when he said “You fall on the floor – it makes sense. You fell, didn’t you?” If you are seemingly voided by cactus & unreason staring from a mythological Páramos where the glaciers blow where the lava seems transcended passing through the arc of great circles much like lavender in the mantra of singed optics I am a thought and a molecule

If you are some deep rain drums I’m all like Oi, if, I, say, I done my sums and I need more plums If you are the street too large to be directly perceived: “street” as a result of a generalizing mental operation I am Tephromancy- “divination by writing in ashes”

If you had nine dimes as a child and now you have bupkis I wade over steppingstones at the mouth of a pill If you I mean the wind had seized the tree, and ha, and ha I sat watery-limbed at the rhythm table … a place of encounter and connivance … we were what was left …

I mean, the incinerated girl might have glued all her ashes back together and gone to work again as a makeup artist for a revived Ancient Rain, everyone having woken up still alive after the World Crisis I mean the days are not full enough and the nights are not full enough and life slips by like a field mouse not shaking the grass I mean that’s not what I mean At. All. Not even close If you are a pinhole camera I mean if many thousand years elapse I mean if in huge say 64 point type Great implications I mean if all those dashes are some kind of code I mean if you say Comprenez, cher amis, que la musique ne se mesure pas au chronometre, as Andre Francis did after Trane et al performed A Love Supreme in Paris, 65 then I say eruptatin

I say gneenaerla I say clies? I say borht I say Oh excuse me!

Oh will you excuse me? I’m just trying to find the bridge ... Has anybody seen the bridge? Bridge?

That was the form of the film. The content was something else entirely. I never saw the face of the protagonist but he (or his camera, rather) had recorded an oral narrative at the same time as the photographic sequence. ‘What is this?’ I asked Leach but he only shook his head and pointed to the wall, indicating I should keep watching. ‘US military. Space personnel,’ he said, tightly. So I watched, from inside the craft’s small space, which had limited views to the outside. There were no clues as to the name of the project or the other two passengers in the craft. However, there was the commentary. ‘We are close to the destination,’ the Sensecam guy said. ‘Johnno reckoned we were going to take much longer on this mission. He’s got a thousand bucks that says we will be back by Thursday but I reckon he’s overestimated. We’ll be back on Wednesday. So that means a tidy little sum for me to spend on my girlfriend’ (laughter). The film showed Johnno looking pissed off, or maybe just sulky, while attending to several computer screens and what looked like cables running everywhere. ‘Johnno doesn’t like to lose a bet, even out here’ (more laughter). Indeed, Johnno looked increasingly irritated by the owner of the Sensecam. The film (loosely termed) flickered and glitched for a few seconds, but Leach tapped my hand and mouthed ‘just wait.’ Sure enough, the sequence started again, for the third time. It was unclear how much time the film covered, over-all. This section had no narration for a few minutes. The images showed Johnno slowly being fascinated by a light that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Like a Tinkerbell glow, the light hovered near Johnno’s ear. It trembled and emanated energy as though it might spontaneously combust. It didn’t. Instead, it expanded to twice its size, soon as big as a plum. Then it aggregated into a million tiny self-replicated glowing lights and moved towards Johnno. In a nanosecond, Johnno was fragmented into atomic dust particles. One minute there, the next gone. A second later, the view shifted as the Sensecam fell to the floor. ‘I don’t understand, Sam,’ I said to Leach. ‘What is this? Some kind of mockumentary?’ He pulled out his laptop and clicked onto a Nanotechnia software site, slid across a still from the film (exactly when the glows seemed to fragment poor Johnno into a constellation) and zoomed closer and closer. ‘Look at that?’ said Sam. ‘Just look.’ We peered at the screen and I found it difficult to make sense of what I saw. At the nano-level, the organisms were clearly biotic. A blossoming of tiny moving creatures, with wriggling legs and mercury-like bodies. ‘Did you tell anyone about this, Sam?’ I asked. ‘Did you report it?’ He told me he wouldn’t be reporting it; it wasn’t his business and it wasn’t my place to get involved either. He had only shown it to me to elaborate on the relevance and importance of his recent body of artwork, Dymaxion. This was something I needed to know if I insisted on writing on his work. Suddenly we heard the sound of a wheelie bin being dragged along, outside the back shed. The wet blanket smell was churning my stomach again, but not enough to miss the look of fear on Sam’s face. ‘Are you okay Sam?’ He jumped up and snatched a folder from the side table and thrust it at me. ‘You have to sign this agreement. To say you won’t divulge what I’ve shown you.’ My mouth was open. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I glanced at the folder, which had a contract with my name, all ready for the signing. Perhaps it was that Sam had prepared the document before I came, or it was the overbearing stink of wet wool, but I resisted signing. Just as I prepared to tell him I wouldn’t be able to do as he’d asked, I noticed a silhouette move outside the opaque shed window. Then another. I saw Sam see the shadows, too. ‘Hurry, do it now,’ he said, ‘Then, get out of here.’ It may have been his family returning home? A friend, come to visit? Or something else. Sam stood and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wiped his hands on his jeans and looked at his watch. So I scribbled my name, thrust the paper at his chest and strode back through his front door. Glancing down each end of the street, I took off up the footpath, fast as I could. The sound recordings that resulted — she released dozens of albums before her death last year — are unpredictable and atmospheric, but there is nothing chaotic or haphazard about them. The sequences of sounds and shifting tones seem to deliver the incremental comprehension of an ancient secret. It’s as if she’s drawing out sounds that always existed but remained untapped. The results may be elemental, but they’re certainly not relaxing; they seem to express multiple intelligences from the innermost and furthermost realms: the chthonic, the galactic, the electromagnetic, the human, the fantastic. This is what a conference of black holes, isotopes, fossils, ghosts and nerve endings sounds like. Then Filip Marinovich began to channel Jack Spicer, but not just Spicer, Spicer and us, as if we were all back in Vancouver together, back or for the first time I dunno, it was like Nietzsche’s ‘da capo, da capo’, which I think translates as eternal return. Then I imagined one of those videos in which a flower grows really fast. I mean, I have always loved the idea of off-off-Broadway or off-off-off-Broadway because I imagine that’s where there’s the most fake blood and stuff. So Jesus was queer, or lonely, or had been abused, and urged others (or was “used” by them) to get their hands on the means of survival or pleasure. He was too ardent but simultaneously too frozen — requiring a disturbing “thawing out.” And where else had Frances been that Whittier seemed as good a place as any? No wonder she acted stand-offish, and screamed at night. What happened to her brother, and what kind of fun or danger was junking? How could she be stupid if she was an incorrigible reader, and what was she reading as the potatoes burned? Like you I don’t know how to answer

like you I don’t know how to answer the secret police or to prove that the makalam of promakalam prokalastarrokalarembrokelastrrmakalastostemarlokerster

Or, to quote Hyacinth, “To walk is somewhat more abstract than life.” “So what are world memories,” one voice asks. “It turns out that they are war memories.” But it was hardly war, the hardliest of wars. Hardly, hardly. It occurred to me that this particular war was hardly war because of kids, more kids, those poor kids. The kids were hungry until we GIs fed them. We dusted them with DDT. The “kids” here are poor, they are hungry, they are chewing bubble gum. As Luswage Amini reminds us, “Ravicka continues its decay, but also something else I cannot name ... even the air with which I speak is lessening.”